Streaming video is the norm these days. Whether watching a movie or TV show from one of the many services out there, catching a quick laugh or how-to on YouTube, or watching some promotional video on a company's website, we have all come to expect media streaming as a way of entertainment and education. Consumers (and I will admittedly put myself into this group as well!) are usually picky about the quality of their playback. Buffering? Stuttering playback? Chances are you just lost interest.

As a web developer, server administrator or content provider, how do you serve up streaming audio/video content? YouTube can be a solid option but not for everyone as many companies prefer to host it themselves and not rely on any third party. If you choose to host your own streaming media, you now have to make sure you can support all of your clients' devices and browsers and convert the videos accordingly or risk some clients being unable to play your video.

LEAD Technologies has a strong commitment to ongoing support and improvements to the current version. This isn't just the bare minimum bug fixing and workarounds like the rest, we're talking about new features and additions that are added to the toolkit at no charge or upgrade fee. Today we have released an update to the Media Foundation features within the LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK.

At first glance some of these features might not seem like much, such as a live preview for the capture and convert controls. However, anyone who has attempted low level Media Foundation programming knows this is a pretty major undertaking. The near-magical work our engineers did will save LEADTOOLS customers countless hours of headache! Here's what's new and improved for the Media Foundation SDK:

LEAD Technologies has added two popular feature requests which will be available to all Version 18 customers free of charge. The h.264 Encoder now supports Intel Quick Sync Video hardware acceleration. On supported processors, the video encoding time is typically cut in half, with an almost 60% reduction in CPU utilization.

For processors that do not support Intel Quick Sync video, customers can also take advantage of new High Profile capabilities (in addition to the already supported Main and Baseline) for improved video encoding onto Blu-Ray media.

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Nathan.

What is Does

This C project will perform OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

Today we released several updates to LEADTOOLS Multimedia Version 19. In particular, the H.264 encoder and RTSP Source filter are faster and offer greater flexibility.

• NVIDIA CUDA hardware acceleration (NVENC) for H.264 encoder — NVIDIA's latest graphics cards and video drivers include even better hardware acceleration than the previous generation (NVCUVENC). H.265 support for NVENC acceleration is currently in beta and LEADTOOLS is excited about adding this support to our H.265 encoder in the future.
• Automatic timestamp drift correction for AAC and H.264 encoders — An incredibly useful feature for the TV industry. With video capture and DVR applications often running for days, timestamps can begin to drift resulting in out of sync audio and video streams. LEADTOOLS' AAC and H.264 encoders can now automatically detect and correct these problems when they arise in the capture hardware.
• RTSP Source Filter callback and MaxTimeout parameter — When RTSP streams encounter connection and load-time issues, both of these features make it possible for the client to abort the process manually or after a specified amount of time.
• YUV color space support in Video Callback Filter — Customers using the Video Callback filter can now work directly with YUV data without converting it to RGB.

All of these new features are freely available to those evaluating and who have already purchased LEADTOOLS Version 19. All you need to do is download the latest setup from our website!